English

A Robust Certified Machine Unlearning Method Under Distribution Shift

Machine Learning 2026-01-13 v1 Cryptography and Security

Abstract

The Newton method has been widely adopted to achieve certified unlearning. A critical assumption in existing approaches is that the data requested for unlearning are selected i.i.d.(independent and identically distributed). However,the problem of certified unlearning under non-i.i.d. deletions remains largely unexplored. In practice, unlearning requests are inherently biased, leading to non-i.i.d. deletions and causing distribution shifts between the original and retained datasets. In this paper, we show that certified unlearning with the Newton method becomes inefficient and ineffective under non-i.i.d. unlearning sets. We then propose a better certified unlearning approach by performing a distribution-aware certified unlearning framework based on iterative Newton updates constrained by a trust region. Our method provides a closer approximation to the retrained model and yields a tighter pre-run bound on the gradient residual, thereby ensuring efficient (epsilon, delta)-certified unlearning. To demonstrate its practical effectiveness under distribution shift, we also conduct extensive experiments across multiple evaluation metrics, providing a comprehensive assessment of our approach.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.06967,
  title  = {A Robust Certified Machine Unlearning Method Under Distribution Shift},
  author = {Jinduo Guo and Yinzhi Cao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.06967},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:59:40.273Z